Understanding Rock This page intentionally left blank Understanding Rock ESSAYS IN MUSICAL ANALYSIS Edited by JOHN COVACH & GRAEME M. BOONE New York Oxford Oxford University Press 1997 Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Bombay Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Dares Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1997 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Understanding rock : essays in musical analysis / edited by John Covach and Graeme M. Boone. p. cm. Includes index. Contents: Progressive rock, "Close to the edge," and the boundaries of style / John Covach — After sundown : the Beach Boys' experimental music / Daniel Harrison — Blues transformations in the music of Cream / Dave Headlam — "Joanie" get angry: k. d. lang's feminist revision / Lori Burns — Swallowed by a song: Paul Simon's crisis of chromaticism / Walter Everett — Little wing: a study in musical cognition / Matthew Brown — Tonal and expressive ambiguity in "Dark star" / Graeme M. Boone. ISBN 0-19-510004-2; ISBN 0-19-510005-0 (pbk.) 1. Rock music—History and criticism. 2. Rock music—Analysis, appreciation. ML3534.U53 1997 781.66'0973—dc21 96-53475 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid free paper Preface n the summer of 1974, the rock critic Lester Bangs was invited to type a review of Ia J. Geils Band concert onstage as part of the band's show. Jumping at the chance to jam with a favorite band and, at the same time, to storm the ultimate barrier between music and meaning, Bangs set up his typewriter next to the musicians as if it were another instrument. As he typed away in rhythmic and mental counterpoint to the music, he became more excited and frustrated until, at the song's climax, he smashed the table and finally stomped the typewriter itself in a fit of ecstatic rage.1 Is this the way it is, or should be, between rock music and the critical mind? Since the beginning of rock 'n' roll, opponents of the music, and some fans too, would have us think so. The plaint of rock's enemies is familiar: loud, raucous, drug ridden, and narcissistic, if not nihilistic, rock music causes degeneration in youth, transmit- ting social evils and subverting rational thought and responsibility; even worse, it is boring, annoying, bad music. The same, of course, was thought about earlier musi- cal crazes that now seem tame and stodgy by comparison: swing, ragtime, the waltz, the minuet, the sarabande. Each of these did in fact threaten some perceived ele- ment of social order, and rock has posed its own distinct threats: arising in a time of social upheaval, it has reflected, accompanied, enabled, and at times even consti- tuted the rumblings of that upheaval. Partly for that very reason, however, a generation has grown up for whom this music is fundamental and necessary; partly also because it has simply been there, a vi Preface central part of American life. It hardly seems coincidental that the election of 1992 should have climaxed with a sax-toting president and a rock anthem. In this and innumerable other ways, rock music has come of age: not in itself, for it sprang fully fledged from the bosom of postwar America, but rather as a cultural force internal- ized by the broadest spectrum of American society. In 1968, a Star Trek episode could shock us with a scene from after the year 2000, showing a rock band com- posed of elderly hippies (yipes!) whose wrinkles and gray hair clashed disturbingly with their peace symbols and bellbottoms. In 1997 such an image is no longer shock- ing at all: we see it on record covers all the time, a natural (no matter how ironic) course of events. In precise contrast to the Star Trek hippies, today's old rockers look happy, well adjusted, successful, rich. The counterculture is the culture. Rock's social stigmata remain, of course, but they are integrated into an increas- ingly complicated status quo. In a time of unprecedented social and cultural eclecti- cism, the enduring American preoccupation with distinctions of highbrow versus lowbrow is greeted with ambivalence by a society for which it has lost its clarity and, for many, its relevance. In that respect, the doomsayers are right. Allan Bloom's call to America, to "grow up" beyond childish, blaring popular music, falls on the deaf ears of a public crowned with Walkmen.2 In other respects, however, the doom- sayers are wrong, as they always have been. Each younger generation grows up into, and through, its popular music, in pursuit of its own maturity. That music is a part of the American environment, and the music's changes will continue to reflect broader social changes, as they always have in the past. As American culture drifts inevitably further from its traditional Western European slant, it cannot but re- define and reinvent itself; but this does not mean that its diverse roots will be lost. Instead, they take on a new, and newly specific, relevance. Rock, country, jazz, hip- hop, classical, and other musics continue to influence each other and intertwine in smooth or rough combinations, just as their audiences do; and writers about music continue to absorb and reflect upon these developments. Lester Bangs's essay offers a classic example of such reflection. Is it a violation of his experience that, following his J. Geils bacchanal, he should have sat himself down again, presumably at another typewriter, to write a story, and a parable, of it? It is that second act of writing, not the first, that brought his story into existence for us, the public who knows him only through reading him. His personal rock apoca- lypse was, after all, only a passing delirium whose darknesses proved compatible with, even essential to, his goals and responsibilities as a critic and a person. The same is true of the vast majority of rock experience. Writings about rock music profit from the opportunity to relate, and reflect on, remarkably broad and fresh varieties of musical and social activities, ranging from the most Dionysian and in-the-moment to the most Apollonian and coolheaded; to make sense of them through language; and to bring them into relationship with other aspects of personal and social life. To the extent that there remains a challenging, or even conflictual, relationship between rock music and traditional social values, the paradox of creation and destruction that Bangs sets down is likely to form an essential part of the best rock writing. As those values change, so will the music change, and so will the writing. Seven years ago, at the time when this book was first conceived, academic atten- tion to rock music was in a period of tremendous growth, the results of which now Preface vii surround us clamorously. In bookshops throughout the country, the proportion of popular in relation to classical titles is expanding, and now includes academic stud- ies as well as detailed transcriptions, histories, and biographies.3 Meanwhile, acade- mic job listings around the country show an unprecedented demand for popular specializations. These developments result in a new kind of irony, for there is, as yet, no clear "discipline" of rock studies, no consensus on what might constitute its focus or its limits, as a field of study or set of approaches; and it is not clear that there ever will or should be.4 It is not that scholars have failed to attempt to address such ques- tions. On the contrary, the interested reader is no longer lacking in stylistic over- views, encyclopedic histories, theoretical treatises, and college textbooks. But these manifold projects are beset from the outset by ideological and methodological con- troversies, while still lacking the solid underpinning of serious, close musical analy- sis that is needed if clear musicological understanding is to be obtained. Conservatives doubt that rock music should be taught in universities at all, since the traditional focus of the humanities has been on canonical works in the Euro- pean art tradition. Radicals doubt that analytical methods developed to describe such art music can appropriately be employed to address what is most meaningful in rock, since such analyses reinforce the musical work as an autonomous aesthetic object and produce interpretations foreign to the proper nature of the music. Such debates have their value and are, in any event, inevitable. But while some will see fit to pursue them to logical or extreme conclusions, others will continue, more quietly, to lay the groundwork that the field of rock musicology needs, if it is to find com- patibility with the goals and assumptions of existing pedagogy. For it is the firm conviction of the writers in this book that that pedagogy, while in need of further reflection and modification (as it always is), provides strong and useful tools for analysis of rock music as it does for other music, and that, through such analysis, a better understanding of the music—not just the conditions surrounding it, but the music itself—can be gained. Like Lester Bangs, we have been through the music and have faith in its integrability, just as we have no doubt about the positive impact rock analysis can and will have on other musical analysis.5 Work on Understanding Rock Music began in 1990, after five of its contributors (Boone, Brown, Covach, Everett, and Headlam), all active in musicological and the- oretical circles of academia, gave papers at a special session devoted to the analysis of rock music at the joint national meeting of the Society for Music Theory and the American Musicological Society in Oakland, California.